Talking Trash.(recycling in New York City)

I don't get it," said Miguel, scratching his head. "We've just got through figuring out what to put in the garbage that we weren't supposed to before, and now they're telling me it's all wrong."

Miguel's perplexity is understandable--he's an all-purpose maintenance man at a midtown-Manhattan residential building. It's been barely a year since the City of New York declared that it was ending the recycling of plastic and glass. Prior to the announcement, city residents were supposed to carefully winnow out plastic and glass from their trash and place them in separate blue bags to be picked up once a week for recycling. Then in 2002, New York's businessman turned mayor, Michael

Bloomberg, declared that even though recycling might be good for the environment, it was bad for the city's budget. The costs of sorting, picking up and processing the reusables were much greater than the benefits, he explained.

You've got to hand it to Hizzoner: he has an open mind. When contractors offered the city rates that made recycling cheaper, the mayor bit. It turns out that ending recycling didn't actually plug the hole in the budget, while it did help widen the hole in the ozone. So as of July 1, the city decided that plastic was to be recycled again. Glass could still be tossed out, but only until next April, when it too will join the ranks of the recyclable.

So you can imagine Miguel's befuddlement. Four times a day he rides the service elevator from floor to floor, emptying the blue and green recycling bins where residents dump their metal and newspapers (which continued to be recycled). Many residents, whether out of green convictions or sheer habit, dropped plastic and glass into the bins too, as they had until last year. It was Miguel's job to separate them from the newspapers and aluminum cans and add them to the garbage. Now, suddenly, he's been told to preserve the plastic. ...